Tag: Occupy Central

On November 9 it will be 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The Wall’s collapse was preceded by a couple of months of popular unrest in East Germany. The epicentre was Leipzig, where, on October 9, 1989, a month before the Wall was finally torn down, 70,000 demonstrators faced down a massive, heavily armed security presence to march peacefully through their city centre in one of the most impressive displays of civil courage seen in Europe since the war.

I hear that a former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, is making out the Wall’s eventual collapse had nothing to do with these people. I disagree. That night in Leipzig the people looked into the eyes of the East German regime and saw it for the paper tiger it always was. They lost their fear, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Back then I worked for a publisher of academic journals and so I paid no mind to how professional investors reacted to this event. I hope they were pleased. But, to be frank, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they weren’t. Because it probably created a bit of uncertainty.